The ex-ballerina betting big on prediction markets

Feb 6, 2026

Luana Lopes Lara, a former professional ballerina turned MIT-trained entrepreneur who built regulated prediction markets platform Kalshi. She discusses trading real-world event outcomes, how ballet taught resilience, building a federally regulated exchange, navigating legal fights and ethics, and how markets can act as political barometers.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

From Ballet To MIT Pivot

Luana left professional ballet after nine months to study at MIT and pivot into maths and statistics.
That personal switch led her from dance to quantitative finance and ultimately to building Kalshi.

INSIGHT

Markets Should Trade Futures Directly

Luana spotted a gap where markets imply views about the future rather than let people trade them directly.
She founded Kalshi to let users trade binary outcomes on real-world events as a clearer information signal.

ADVICE

Regulate Before You Launch

Do use regulated processes when offering new financial products to ensure legal approval.
Luana stresses that every Kalshi market is approved through a federal regulatory process before launch.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

In our first edition of Meet the Founders, we meet Luana Lopes Lara, creator of Kalshi, a prediction markets startup that allows users to trade on the outcome of real-world events - from inflation and interest rates to elections and geopolitics.

Kalshi drew attention for showing Zohran Mamdani as a favourite in the NYC mayoral race, as prediction markets gain traction as political barometers. But the wider industry has also faced scrutiny: a trader on rival platform Polymarket reportedly made nearly half a million dollars betting on the capture of Venezuela’s former president Nicolás Maduro before it was announced.

The controversy around prediction markets has placed Lopes Lara and her company at the centre of a growing regulatory and ethical debate in the US. In this episode, the Brazilian founder explains how the discipline and resilience of ballet has shaped her approach to building a business, and why she believes markets can often forecast the future better than experts.

If you'd like to get in touch with the team, our email address is businessdaily@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Sam Fenwick Producer: Amber Mehmood Sound mix: Toby James

Business Daily is the home of in-depth audio journalism devoted to the world of money and work. From small startup stories to big corporate takeovers, global economic shifts to trends in technology, we look at the key figures, ideas and events shaping business.

Each episode is a 17-minute deep dive into a single topic, featuring expert analysis and the people at the heart of the story.

Recent episodes explore the weight-loss drug revolution, the growth in AI, the cost of living, why bond markets are so powerful, China's property bubble, and Gen Z's experience of the current job market.

We also feature in-depth interviews with company founders - like Luana Lopes Lara - and some of the world's most prominent CEOs. These include the CEO of Google Sundar Pichai, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and billionaire founder Judy Faulkner of Epic Systems, one of the world's largest medical record software providers.

(Picture: Luana Lara Lopes, founder and Chief Operating Officer of Kalshi.)